$GME price in Jan-Feb 2021. Image Credits: https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/GME Folks like Melvin Capital and Citron Research think that GameStop is a dying business. The general public is optimistic though, be it for fundamental reasons (e.g. Ryan Cohen (chewy.com) will help GameStop can re-invent itself in the online space ), or for personal amusement, or FOMO. In particular, /r/wallstreetbets members are buying lots of call options ....
Maximizing the Value for Shareholders Suing a company for not following its code of ethics and therefore misleading investors doesn’t fly, but Signet Jewelers settled for $240m . Signet’s 70k female employees sued for discrimination, but the class action is yet to be resolved.
Tom Toro’s New Yorker cartoon : Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders....
The Trade of the Century: When George Soros Broke the British Pound. Rohin Dhar. priceonomics.com . Jun 17, 2016. Before the EU, Europe had the ERM to fix their exchange rates with the Deutschmark within 6% of the agreed upon rate.
Keeping the exchange rate fixed requires governments to nudge the rate, e.g.
Use reserves of foreign currency to buy up their own currency Set high interest rates to entice lenders to buy their currency Margaret Thatcher (PM) opposed the fixed exchange rates but lost the vote to Major, an ERM proponent....
Short Selling Say $A shares are selling at $100, but I think they’re overpriced. So I borrow 10 shares, pay my brokerage interest and post some collateral. I then sell the shares for $1,000.
Whoever buys my shares has no idea that I do not own them. In a naked short, I do not actually borrow or ensure that the security can be borrowed within the standard 3-day settlement period....
Objectives: low latency, high throughput & high reliability.
The messages are quite brief, e.g. the ITCH protocol uses 32 bytes per message.
Trading firm listens to broadcasts on buys, sells, deletes on ITCH broadcasts. Online sorting to identify profitable trades.
Matching engine operates on a first-come-first-served basis. Earlier orders with better price get traded first.
Markets run at 50 microsecond scales.
Single market peaks at 10Gbps. Peaks are correlated, e.g. “Shit!...